News organizations now refer to President Trump's whoppers — from the size of his inaugural crowds to a hurricane threatening Alabama — as routinely as referring to rain in Seattle.

But, there was still some surprise this week when at services to mark the 18th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the president insisted, "Soon after, I went down to Ground Zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could ... We were not alone. So many others were scattered around trying to do the same. They were all trying to help."

Richard Alles, battalion chief of the New York Fire Department at the time of the attacks, spent several months in the smoking, choking ruins at ground zero. He told PolitiFact this summer, "I was there for several months — I have no knowledge of his being down there." He added that there would be a record of Donald Trump sending a hundred or more workers to aid in the harrowing recovery efforts at Ground Zero; there is not.